My review is here: http://moosplace.blogspot.com/2009/09... ( )

Going beyond explication of investigation, Miyuki Miyabe’s All She Was Worth also mixed in a good amount of characterization with its crime fiction plotting. It’s a little slow in the first half, but the pacing picks up quite a bit in the second. I didn’t care much for the anti-consumerism anti-credit diatribes, even though I agree with them philosophically. I think they could have been shortened resulting in a better paced book. Miyabe’s multi-layered characters were the strong point of the book.

(Full review at my blog) ( )

I picked up All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe a few months ago because I liked Brave Story, a novel geared towards younger audiences. All She Was Worth was Miyabe’s first adult book that I’ve read and one of the few mystery novels I’ve read this year.

All She Was Worth starts off with the disappearance of a woman and follows an on-leave detective as he tries to find her and uncover the unusual circumstances in which she disappeared. Although that’s the main mystery flowing through the book, I didn’t find it that engaging. I already guessed what had happened to her and the characters of the book felt so distanced.

The story takes place in present-day Japan and the Miyabe does thorough albeit sometimes dull job of describing Japanese consumer culture. There were points in the book where I felt the author was being too didactic and the things the characters were saying sounded artificial. It was almost like reading a guide-book about Japanese culture.

The payoff of a good mystery book is the “aha!” moment when everything just clicks. Unfortunately, that never really happened in All She Was Worth because the reader will know exactly what happened by the first half of the book. Most of the book is proving and finding evidence of what happened.

I was egged on to read the book by my curiosity concerning the motives of fugitive character. It was disappointing to see the story ending so abruptly and not answering any of the questions I had. The ending felt like a cliffhanger of a show that never got to run its next season. ( )

Japanese mystery about a police detective currently on medical leave and a private investigation he undertakes for his nephew, whose fiancée has disappeared after an argument they had. The investigation leads Honma into the murky world of excessive credit card debt, bankruptcy, identity theft and murder. Very enjoyable read—I always like getting immersed in the culture of a different country and enjoy the authenticity that an author who is a native of that country provides. The mystery was also very intriguing, and I liked the main character a lot. Unfortunately, I believe the author doesn’t write series books, just stand-alones, but I enjoyed this enough to seek out more by the same author even though I probably won’t be meeting the main character again. ( )

Miyuki Miyabe fleshes out a sordidly suspenseful web of lies that start from a simple case of one woman's stolen identity. Shunsuke Honma, a middle-aged Tokyo police inspector with a 10-year-old son, takes on a private detective case a la Vertigo while on disability leave when a nephew asks for his help in finding his missing fiancée.

Who is at the bottom of this brutal crime, and what motives led to the murder of the real woman, Shoko Sekine? This is an absorbing novel that not only presents a pithy mystery but also shows an insider's look into Japan's uniquely complex address registration and census system, as well as an anecdote that illustrates how the bursting of Japan's bubble economy led much of its middle-class to fall into a cycle of lending and debt. ( )

An interesting mystery, better than Miyabe's other book that I read (Shadow Family). The story of a missing persons case tied up in the family obligations of the detective gets much weightier as it goes along. The plot got bogged down a bit in the middle, with lengthy discussions about the consumer debt trap and personal bankruptcy in Japan, although it's a bit unfair for me to criticize this when part of what I enjoyed about the book was its glimpse into Japanese culture. ( )

One of my friends described the writing style as being like a manga and it's true. It takes a bit to get into it but once you're in, you're in until the anti-climatic in. ( )

A noir detective story set in Japan where everyone is too polite and helpful for a proper noir feel. Still, it has a couple of murders, and evokes very well the hopelessness of getting past the disgrace of something that wouldn’t be that big a deal in the US – getting too far into debt and going bankrupt. ( )

I really liked this, and I'm not too fond of mystery novels. It provides an interesting insight into Japanese culture and is very well constructed. ( )

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/1... ( )